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I've gone through the manual posting of my links at the top search engines and have done the free auto-submission services as well. It's been about three weeks and still I don't see anything listed. Is it necessary to pay for submissions in order to get the higher rankings? If anyone can point me to some "how-to's" I'd appreciate it.

April

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TEAMWORK is the fuel that allows common people
to produce uncommon results.

Well first of all only submit once to each engine... if you submit multiple times it's bad for your ranking.

Second of all submit to directories too, like Yahoo and dmoz.org Yahoo is of course the web's most popular site. dmoz.org is run by netscape (aol) and if you're on their you'll be listed in the searches done by AOLs 20 some million members and other search engines use dmoz.org as a backbone as well.

finally wait, it takes awhile, to check for your site search for it, and to be sure I know on altavista you can search for this "url: xxxx.com" (or whatever or site is) so searching for "url: sitepoint.com" would show you which sitepoint pages altavista has indexed. So do that for your site and see if you really have been indexed yet, you may have been but are so low on the rankings you dont get any hits.

Finally you can pay promotion services if you got cash to throw around, do a search on website promotion and you'll find a bunch. And then there are pay per click search engines like goto.com which is highly recommended for generating traffic. Just bid 1 or 2 cents on each keyword.

Altavista normally takes a week to index a site, but other major search engines may take 3 to 8 weeks. You have to be patient. However, it is also highly possible that your sites are not accepted at all. Like you, I tried all kinds of methods and my site is still not listed. Recently, I found out that submitting my site alone is not enough. I still have to optimize the meta tags in my site. To do that, you can download a WebPosition Gold software. Alternatively, you can sign up with companies like ProBoost.com which does search engines optimization. Of course, there are many other companies providing the same service, but some are really dubious. By the way, click on the following link to my site to try WebTriage, it does website optimization and submission plus it provides WebPosition Gold download. http://members.tripodasia.com.sg/LittleMall/web_2.html